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Essays in Radical Empiricism

Chapter 12: Absolutism and Empiricism[1]

No seeker of truth can fail to rejoice at the terre-à-terre sort of discussion of the
issues between Empiricism and Transcendentalism (or, as the champions of the latter would
probably prefer to say, between Irrationalism and Rationalism) that seems to have begun in
Mind .[2] It would seem as if , over concrete examples like Mr.
J. S. Haldane's, both parties ought inevitably to come to a better understanding. As a
reader with a strong bias towards Irrationalism, I have studied his article 3 with the
liveliest admiration of its temper and its painstaking effort to be clear. But the cases
discussed failed to satisfy me, and I was at first tempted to write a Note animadverting
upon them in detail. The growth of the limb, the sea's contour, the vicarious functioning
of the nerve-centre, the digitalis curing the heart, are unfortunately

(267) not cases where we can see any through-and-through conditioning
of the parts by the whole. They are all cases of reciprocity where subjects, supposed
independently to exist, acquire certain attributes through their relations to other
subjects. That they also exist through similar relations is only an ideal
supposition, not verified to our understanding in these or any other concrete cases
whatsoever.

If, however, one were to urge this solemnly, Mr. Haldane's friends could easily reply that
he only gave us such examples on account of the hardness of our hearts. He knew full well
their imperfection, but he hoped that to those who would not spontaneously ascend to the
Notion of the Totality, these cases might prove a spur and suggest and symbolize something
better than themselves. No particular case that can be brought forward is a real concrete.
They are all abstractions from the Whole, and of course the "through-and-through
" character can not be found in them. Each of them still contains among its elements
what we call things, grammatical subjects,

(268) forming a sort of residual caput mortuum of Existence after all the
relations that figure in the examples have been told off. On this "'existence,"
thinks popular philosophy, things may live on, like-the winter bears on their own fat,
never entering relations at all, or, if entering them, entering an entirely different set
of them from those treated of in Mr. Haldane's examples. Thus if the digitalis were to
weaken instead of strengthening the heart, and to produce death (as sometimes happens), it
would determine itself, through determining the organism, to the function of
"kill" instead of that of "cure." The function and relation seem
adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalis gets hold of, the digitalis
and the heart being facts external and, so to speak, accidental to each other. But this
popular view, Mr. Haldane's friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the
"existence " of digitalis and heart outside of the relations of killing or
curing, is but a function in a wider system of relations, of which, pro hac vice, we
take no account. The larger system

(269) determines the existence just as absolutely as the system
"kill," or the system "cure," determined the function of the
digitalis. Ascend to the absolute system, instead of biding with these relative and
partial ones, and you shall see that the law of through-and-throughness must and does
obtain.

Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us completely from chopping
logic about the concrete examples Mr. Haldane has chosen. It is not his fault if his
categories are so fine an instrument that nothing but the sum total of things can be taken
to show us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he has not the sum
total of things to show it by. Let us fall back from all concrete attempts and see what we
can do with his notion of through-and-throughness, avowedly taken in abstracto. In
abstract systems the " through-and-through " Ideal is realized on every hand. In
any system, as such, the members are only members in the system. Abolish the
system and you abolish its members, for you have conceived them through no

(270) other property than the abstract one of membership. Neither rightness nor
leftness, except through bi-laterality. Neither mortgager nor mortgagee, except through
mortgage. The logic of these cases is this: -- If A, then B; but if B, then A: wherefore if
either, Both; and if not Both, Nothing.

It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to admit that the absolute totality of things
may be organized exactly after the pattern of one of these " through-and-through
" abstractions. In fact, it is the pleasantest and freest of mental movements.
Husband makes, and is made by, wife, through marriage; one makes other, by being itself
other; everything self-created through its opposite -- you go round like a squirrel in a
cage. But if you stop and reflect upon what you are about, you lay bare the exact point at
issue between common sense and the " through-and-through " school.

What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract systems? It is, as we said above: If any
Member, then the Whole System; if not the Whole System, then Nothing. But how can Logic

(271) possibly do anything more with these two hypotheses than combine them into the
single disjunctive proposition -- "Either this Whole System, just as it stands, or
Nothing at all." Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of Logic in the matter,
and can any disjunction, as such, resolve itself ? It may be that Mr. Haldane
sees how one horn, the concept of the Whole System, carries real existence with it. But if
he has been as unsuccessful as I in assimilating the Hegelian re-editings of the Anselmian
proof,[4] he will have to say that though Logic may determine what the
system must be, if it is, something else than Logic must tell us that it
is. Mr. Haldane in this case would probably consciously, or unconsciously, make an appeal
to Fact: the disjunction is decided, since nobody can dispute that now, as a matter of
fact, something, and not nothing, is. We must therefore, he would
probably say, go on to admit the Whole System in the desiderated sense. Is not then the
validity of the Anselm

(272)-ian proof the nucleus of the whole question between Logic and Fact? Ought not the
efforts of Mr. Haldane and his friends to be principally devoted to its elucidation? Is it
not the real door of separation between Empiricism and Rationalism? And if the
Rationalists leave that door for a moment off its hinges, can any power keep that
abstract, opaque, unmediated, external, irrational, and irresponsible monster, known to
the vulgar as bare Fact, from getting in and contaminating the whole sanctuary with his
presence? Can anything prevent Faust from changing "Am Anfang war das Wort "
into "Am Anfang war die That ? "

Nothing in earth or heaven. Only the Anselmian proof can keep Fact out of philosophy. The
question, "Shall Fact be recognized as an ultimate principle? " is the whole
issue between the Rationalists and the Empiricism of vulgar thought.

Of course, if so recognized, Fact sets a limit to the " through-and-through "
character of the world's rationality. That rationality might

(273) then mediate between all the members of our conception of the world, but not
between the conception itself and reality. Reality would have to be given, not by Reason,
but by Fact. Fact holds out blankly, brutally and blindly, against that universal
deliquescence of everything into logical relations which the Absolutist Logic demands, and
it is the only thing that does hold out. Hence the ire of the Absolutist Logic -hence its
non-recognition, its 'cutting' of Fact.

The reasons it gives for the 'cutting' are that Fact is speechless, a mere word for the
negation of thought, a vacuous unknowability, a dog-in-the-manger, in truth, which having
no rights of its own, can find nothing else to do than to keep its betters out of theirs.

There are two points involved here: first the claim that certain things have rights
that are absolute, ubiquitous and all pervasive, and in regard to which nothing else can
possibly exist in its own right; and second that anything that denies this assertion is
pure negativity with no positive context whatsoever.

(274)

Take the latter point first. Is it true that what is negative in one way is thereby
convicted of incapacity to be positive in any other way? The word " Fact " is
like the word " Accident," like the word "Absolute" itself. They all
have their negative connotation. In truth, their whole connotation is negative and
relative. All it says is that, whatever the thing may be that is denoted by the words, other
things do not control it. Where fact, where accident is, they must be silent, it
alone can speak. But that does not prevent its speaking as loudly as you please, in its
own tongue. It may have an inward life, self-transparent and active in the maximum degree.
An indeterminate future volition on my part, for example, would be a strict accident as
far as my present self is concerned. But that could not prevent it, in the moment in
which it occurred, from being possibly the most intensely living and luminous
experience I ever had. Its quality of being a brute fact ab extra says nothing whatever as
to its inwardness. It simply says to outsiders: 'Hands off!'

(275)

And this brings us back to the first point of the Absolutist indictment of Fact. Is
that point really anything more than a fantastic dislike to letting anything say
'Hands off '? What else explains the contempt the Absolutist authors exhibit for a freedom
defined simply on its " negative " side, as freedom "from," etc.? What
else prompts them to deride such freedom? But, dislike for dislike, who shall decide? Why
is not their dislike at having me "from" them, entirely on a par with mine at
having them "through" me?

I know very well that in talking of dislikes to those who never mention them, I am
doing a very coarse thing, and making a sort of intellectual Orson of myself. But, for the
life of me, I can not help it, because I feel sure that likes and dislikes must be
among the ultimate factors of their philosophy as well as of mine. Would they but admit
it! How sweetly we then could hold converse together! There is something finite about us
both, as we now stand. We do not know the Absolute Whole yet. Part of it is still
negative to us. Among

(276) the whats of it Still stalks a mob of opaque thats, without which we cannot
think. But just as I admit that this is all possibly provisional that even the Anselmian
proof may come out all right, and creation may be a rational system through-and-through,
why might they not also admit that it may all be otherwise, and that the shadow, the
opacity, the negativity, the "from "-ness, the plurality that is ultimate, may
never be wholly driven from the scene. We should both then be avowedly making hypotheses,
playing with Ideals. Ah! Why is the notion of hypothesis so abhorrent to the Hegelian mind
?

And once down on our common level of hypothesis, we might then admit scepticism, since the
Whole is not yet revealed, to be the soundest logical position. But since we are in the
main not sceptics, we might go on and frankly confess to each other the motives for our
several faiths. I frankly confess mine -- I can not but think that at bottom they are. of
an aesthetic and not of a logical sort. The "through-and-through" universe seems
to

(277) suffocate me with its infallible impeccable allpervasiveness. Its necessity, with
no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a
contract with no reserved rights, or rather as if I had to live in a large seaside
boarding-house with no private bed-room in which I might take refuge from the society of
the place. I am distinctly aware, moreover, that the old quarrel of sinner and pharisee
has something to do with the matter. Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians
are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming
Hegelians. There is a story of two clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the same funeral.
One came first and had got no farther than "I am the Resurrection and the Life,"
when the other entered. "I am the Resurrection and the Life," cried the latter.
The "through-and-through" philosophy, as it actually exists, reminds many of us
of that clergyman. It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to
speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious

(278) Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. The "freedom" we
want to see there is not the freedom, with a string tied to its leg and warranted not
to fly away, of that philosophy. "Let it fly away," we say, "from us I What
then?"

Again, I know I am exhibiting my mental grossness. But again, Ich kann nicht anders. I
show my feelings; why will they not show theirs? I know they have a personal
feeling about the through-and-through universe, which is entirely different from mine, and
which I should very likely be much the better for gaining if they would only show me how.
Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it
is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that
in things which Logic does not expel, the most I can do is to aspire to the
expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling. What can kindle
feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelians will refuse to set an example,
what can they expect the rest of

(279) us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel
Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and
aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings,
Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as
anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied.
But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold
parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to
which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which
will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties
on the whole had the best divining power?

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